


Lonely Planet

by fruitcakes



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 07:45:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12250038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitcakes/pseuds/fruitcakes
Summary: Ideas are just that—ideas; wishful thinking like wisps of breath in air, crystallising before collapsing in on themselves till there’s nothing left.Wonwoo learns that, slow and steady.





	Lonely Planet

**Author's Note:**

> This story has kind of weird idea behind it (I mean, all of my stories do lmao but this one especially.) so it's entirely possible it won't make much sense to you. I wrote most of this in one, sudden flash of inspiration so it's, well, not entirely well thought out.
> 
> I hope you like reading it, regardless.

The dark, intimidatingly empty lines on the page stare back at Wonwoo, without a threat but with a plea. They implore him to write, to put pen to paper and let words form, however amateur they may be. And Wonwoo is itching to do just that as he racks his brain for inspiration. He flips through his ideas as he would with vinyls at the record store, perusing the covers, deliberating if he wants to dwell any deeper. 

And he tries,  _ really tries _ , to pick one he never has before. But he’s a creature of habit and as he always does, he turns to daydreams that he’s dreamt so often that they play like a movie behind his eyelids—scene by painstakingly vivid scene.

He begins to write, strings word with word till he has something that evokes something akin to emotion in him. He heaves a satisfied sigh, caps the pen and puts it aside, shelves it alongside all the visuals he painted over the past hour. It’s late, it’s excusable.

Stray thoughts in the wee hours of the night are easy to brush off as the ramblings of a sleep-deprived brain.

~

“Your eggs,” the waiter says as he hands him the paper plate over the counter. Wonwoo quickly snaps out of his trance and pays for the food. Picking up the paper plate, and nearly dropping it, Wonwoo scampers away to find a corner to eat and then peacefully fall asleep in before his next lecture.

It's a tough task, considering every single nook and cranny is taken up by couples on various stages of PDA, which really isn't helping him right now. He frowns bitterly at the sidewalk as he wanders, boiled eggs having gone cold. Eventually, he finds an out-of-the-way staircase, and settles down near a window that lets the breeze in.

It overlooks the amphitheater, where the music club is singing strawberry fields, harmonising, their voices rising and audible as a dull euphony. The song makes washed out images flash in his mind, faint as a watercolour painting held under a tap. They're inconsistent in terms of setting and action and reaction, in terms of everything except the protagonist.

Soonyoung features in them all, he always does. Wonwoo only ever draws up Soonyoung in his mind when it's convenient, when he's free and unoccupied with anything. Easy daydreams and a contrived feeling of longing is really all that Wonwoo can afford for anyone. If it’s for Soonyoung right now, he thinks that's fine. It's good actually, because their lives are two separate circles, tangent to one point, making it impossible for any of Wonwoo's strange tendencies to bleed out and affect anyone except himself.

As the song switches to one he can't recognise, Wonwoo leans back against the wall and drifts off into a nap.

~

Wonwoo wakes up with a start as he hears voices booming in the staircase. He looks back to find two professors engaged in conversation. They barely spare him a glance as they pass him by. Still disoriented, Wonwoo looks out the window. The sun is too far down for it to still be afternoon, and he sighs when he realises he missed all his classes for the day. The music club is still at it, crooning away, now joined by a guitar.

Lazily, Wonwoo descends the stairs. He stands near the open stage, listening as dreams from his nap slowly piece themselves into a picture—of him and Soonyoung in a bed swathed in white, late autumnal afternoon. It's warm in a way that's a decent imitation of summer, and Soonyoung is smiling at him as he says something Wonwoo can't quite make out.

He sighs, feeling strangely guilty as he affords himself the luxury of saving the snapshot for later.

~

Over months of getting to know Soonyoung, Wonwoo has made an ideal version of him in his head—one that is endlessly patient, caring, and starkly beautiful. Objectively, he realises that while Soonyoung is all of those things, he's also temperamental, impatient and a little selfish. He elects to ignore that as he makes Soonyoung the object of his fancies.

He likes to think about him when he's doing mundane things, like folding laundry, eating alone or walking home from college. It's an unconventional means of escape, but not entirely uncharacteristic of Wonwoo, with his peculiar fascination with romance.

Juxtaposed with all the other aspects of his personality, it's incongruity is apparent. Wonwoo wonders where it came from, blames it on mainstream media and the inherent idea it perpetuates that love is the centre of our lives. For the most part, he can understand it.

In a weird way, he knows he's pretending to be in love with Soonyoung. In a weirder way, he's okay with that.

~

“This is Chan,” says Seulgi, arm around the narrow shoulders of a short boy. “He'll be helping you with the script.”

Not for the first time, Wonwoo questions why in the world he thought joining the theatre club would be a good idea. He regrets it time after time. At the beginning of freshman year, he'd thought it would be an excellent way of meeting new people, making friends, exploring his talents. Of course, he did none of those things. Now he's stuck with a script he doesn't want to write with a boy he doesn't want to work with.

“Hi,” he mumbles, eyes falling again to the notebook in his hand, pointedly ignoring the hand outstretched to him in a friendly gestures. In the periphery of his vision, Wonwoo sees it fall away dejectedly.

Chan, it seems, is not easy to deter, because he takes a seat next to Wonwoo on the sandstone steps. “So, are you a senior?”

Wonwoo hums. “And you're obviously a freshman.” He feels old as he says that, though objectively he realises it's irrational.

“Yeah! I'm studying zoology. What about you?”

Wonwoo usually has a hard time keeping up a conversation, so Chan does it all by himself. They chat idly as the members convene for a meeting and they're asked to join too.

Later, as Wonwoo's gathering his stuff, Chan approaches him again, phone held in his hand. “Can I have your number, so we can talk about the script?”

Reluctant as he is, Wonwoo gives in, figuring there's no way out of it. Chan’s brown eyes seem to shine a little brighter. He seems like the eager-to-please kind, the kind Wonwoo has never liked.

“I look forward to working with you!” Chan says, as if Wonwoo is anything close to admirable.

He runs, turns the corner and disappears.

Wonwoo goes back to missing Soonyoung.

~

Anyone who has talked to Soonyoung asserts he is the human rendition of the morning sun—bright and with the promise of a fresh start. Wonwoo disagrees. To him, Soonyoung is all that the sunset is—soft colours and softer warmth, the premise of a day finally gone by and the promise of the strange comfort of home and the night.

~

He’s meeting Chan this evening to work on ideas for the script, and he’s dreading it. Chan is so enthusiastic it grates on Wonwoo’s nerves, rubs him the worst way. Theatre is the last thing he cares about, to have to feign any sort of interest for it is exhausting.

There’s a waffle house that serves great coffee and the owner is a nice, young girl who lets Wonwoo hog the corner table for a few hours too long whenever he zones out while writing. She periodically serves him water, without even asking.

That’s where he asks Chan to meet him. And as he expected, the boy is already there when he peeks in from the window at the facade, probably having reached fifteen minutes early.

Chan greets him excitedly, with a smile that seems to never melt away. For a brief, scary second, Wonwoo is reminded of Soonyoung and his grin. Two thousand kilometres away and Soonyoung is still the biggest presence in Wonwoo’s life. Before the quasi-melancholy sets in, he gets to work.

Even though he's loathe to admit it, working with Chan turns out to be a breeze. The boy has his head in the right place, listens and talks just the right amount and is creative in a way that makes Wonwoo downright jealous.

But he can't, because Chan is… he's a little too nice, making it impossible to associate any negative emotions to him.

At the end of two cups of coffee each, they have something close to half of a first draft and that’s more than Wonwoo can say for any of the stories he’s been working on for weeks now.

It’s late into the evening when they part ways. Dusk has arrived, having bid the sun goodbye long ago. Something about this particular shade of purple has Wonwoo wishing he could be elsewhere at the moment. There’s streets on the campus where the lights haven’t come on yet. Swathed in darkness, he can imagine holding Soonyoung’s hand here on this stretch of the road.  

~

“Hey!”

Wonwoo is startled out of his thoughts by Chan, who's hovering next to him. He nods in response to his greeting, eyes returning promptly to the stage but not quite focusing on anything. They’re doing scene 2 or 3, Wonwoo doesn’t remember. All he knows is the script is being butchered line after line. Wonwoo doesn’t really need to be there to witness its slow death, but he’s there nonetheless. And now, so is Chan.

“Wonwoo, what are you doing after,” he gestures at the actors fumbling through what is hardly put-together enough to be called a rehearsal.

“Nothing,” Wonwoo replies, perusing the next scene as the techs prepare for it.

“Do you want to hang out?”

And Wonwoo is stuck for an answer, fumbling worse than the poor rendition of a self-styled godman the boy on stage is. He looks at Chan for a short second, and he has his shoulders drawn together tighter than usual, expression open and trusting.

He contemplates for a minute. Halfway through it, the lights go out and the theatre is plunged into darkness. Disquieted murmurs breaking out among the group seem muted as Wonwoo deals with his dilemma. Something about not being able to see Chan’s expression lends him a false sense of bravado. “Sure,” he says, the lights coming on as if on cue.

Agreeing was easy. Ignoring the light that seems to leap into Chan’s eyes? That is an uphill task.

~

Wonwoo has a dusty record player back at home. His dad got it years ago from a shop selling antiques and it came with a few choice vinyls of artists Wonwoo had never heard of before. Fair, since he hardly listens to music and they belonged to a time before even his father.

Last New Year’s when he went back for the holidays, hit with a sudden bout of inspiration and curiosity, Wonwoo pulled it out of its polished wooden box and cleaned it gently. Surprisingly, it worked. Eager to test it out, Wonwoo slipped the first vinyl his hands landed on, on the plate. The air seemed to hold still for the short second just before the needle made contact with the groove.

[And then a man is crooning in the silent room.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EHmxGhlE18) It’s a voice Wonwoo doesn’t know, a timbre that’s alien to him, with a quality he cannot pinpoint. But even with all it’s oddities, it’s comfort all the same.

Green tea in hand, Wonwoo lets himself be carried off and away by the romance of the lyrics. He couldn’t help that the first person he thought of was Soonyoung, and he couldn’t help it when the very idea of Soonyoung brought a smile to his lips. That was the start of it all, and that should have been the end of it too.

Except, Wonwoo has never known a bad habit from a good one, he lets them proliferate alike, as he let this one do. Something he should have clipped in the bud, bloomed and blossomed on the back wall of his brain, in the deeper recesses of wants he never addressed head-on.

~

The pier is especially good on cloudy evenings. When the crowd steers clear of the grey skies, Wonwoo enjoys the long, empty expanse of concrete, gazebo in the distance looking small as a toy. It’s a quiet, peaceful reprieve from everything except what little things Wonwoo can never seem to leave behind. Chan, recently, has become one of those things. Wonwoo would compare him to his shadow, but even that deserts him every now and then. Chan doesn’t.

Right now, he’s sitting on the ledge, swinging his legs, licking and biting alterately at his ice cream, looking twelve years old for all the world. Wonwoo gives him a glance from the corner of his eye, but Chan catches that and smiles in return. It makes Wonwoo want to jump right off the jetty at the end and into the water, disregard the impending storm because anything, anything is better than the dilemma that debilitates him when he sees that smile.

“Hyung, I like you,” Chan says, later when they’re walking home. It’s casual, flippant, a statement of the obvious, the way ‘oh, it’s sunny today’ is.  

Wonwoo has had a long few weeks to prepare for this. He has a dismissal ready on the tip of his tongue but it never takes form as his lips lift in a mockery of a smile. “Did no one tell you to be wary of seniors?”

Chan giggles, stuffs his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, a fierce blush on his face. “No, why would they?”

“Something about the fact that young kids like you are fresh meat, easy to take advantage of.”

Chan huffs a short laugh. It materialises in the air, dissipating in faint wisps the very next second. “Thanks for the fair warning.”

Wonwoo mentally pats himself on the back for the manoeuvre.

“But I still like you.”

Wonwoo internally kicks himself.   

~

Wonwoo doesn’t love Soonyoung, he’s just passing the time. It’s a little forlorn, a little pitiful, but he revels in the way he feels when he thinks of Soonyoung. It gives him reason for his sadness.

~

Despite being entirely averse to the idea, Wonwoo lets Chan into his dorm room. The way the boy lounges on his bed, as if it’s his own, makes Wonwoo so uncomfortable he almost shoos him out.

They’re listening to music, reading their own Archie’s comics, side by side on the bed on their stomachs—parallel lines. The radio is playing old songs this evening and it’s soothing. Wonwoo is content till the song switches to one he recognises at the very first note.

“I like this song,” Wonwoo says, leaning his head on his hands, turning sideways to smile at nothing on the wall. A myriad of visuals play behind the curtains of his eyes, vague like drunk memories.

Chan raises one eyebrow, shifting to face Wonwoo. “Never took you for a sap,” he teases.

This would be an ideal time to realise how they’re too close for comfort, but Wonwoo’s lost. He chuckles in lieu of a response. “Don’t tell anyone,” he says, eyes drifting back to Chan’s.

“I won’t,” the young boy promises. He’s got this look on his face that Wonwoo would be a fool to not recognise as fondness. He’s just foolish enough to realise it a second too late, a second that is a break in caution, enough for Chan to lean in and press their lips together. Wonwoo forgets all about sunsets and hazy white edges and missing frames as he melts into it.

When Chan moves back and Wonwoo has space to breathe, air to think, he can comprehend the circumstantial gravity of the action. He smacks his lips, remnants of the foreign feeling being chased away. “I shouldn’t have let you,” he says.

Chan’s eyes are oily black, perfectly blank. It’s a slippery slope like Wonwoo’s never seen before. The silence demands an answer that Wonwoo doesn’t have long enough to formulate so he surrenders with a world-weary sigh, as he kisses Chan again. And a few more times for good measure.

~

Wonwoo can’t, for the longest time, reconcile the clouds of castles he had built in his head with Soonyoung, with the bleaker-looking realities of romance that Chan is. It’s a work in progress, hastened by the uncanny resemblance the two share.

It was a long time coming; he could love someone he’s never met for only so long. Ideas are just that—ideas; wishful thinking like wisps of breath in air, crystallising before collapsing in on themselves till there’s nothing left.

Words will always mean more, even when they’re written at the apex of the moon in the sky; they ask gently for a piece of your mind.

Actions, solid and true and tangible, will always demand attention. Harder to fall for, easier to trust.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry for tricking you guys. The soonwoo never transpired. 
> 
> pls feel free 2 ask any questions u have, or leave any comment in general. Thanks. 
> 
> P.S. Lonely Planet is the 'title' of Wonwoo's notebook.


End file.
